Nick Robinson - Horse Trader - Robert Sangster and the Rise and Fall of the Sport of Kings

Like many men of a steady temperament, but with a very busy mind, Robert Sangster was apt to come out with these slightly high-powered remarks from time to time. The fact that they were sudden, and usually sounded arrogant in the extreme, occasionally unnerved people. But they were always followed by a deep, good-natured chuckle at himself. Pompous he was not, but a mind like his needed an outlet, even though he had never actually heard of such legendary trainers as Dick Dawson, Frank Butters, Alec Taylor, John Porter, Fred Darling or Joe Lawson.

The usual setting for these pearls of modern wisdom from young Sangster was Liverpool’s Kardomah Coffee House, the lunchtime gathering place of 1950s’ upwardly mobile Liverpudlians. It was divided essentially into three sections: those set to inherit a considerable fortune; those who had a plan to amass a considerable fortune; and those who were merely working on a plan to earn a considerable fortune. Robert was a founder member of all three groups and, as the only one to already possess a fortune, he naturally became the unchallenged social leader.

The membership at table at which they gathered became an object of immense envy, admittance being unobtainable to those who did not fit these elite criteria. With Rugby Union only played at public schools in the 1950s, Robert and two or three of his colleagues from the highly reputable Birkenhead Park Rugby Football Club saw the playing of this esteemed sport as a qualification to their group. Several of their number were the sons of friends of Robert’s father. Every provincial city in England at that time had such a table in one of the new, expensive coffee houses and country towns had their groups of wealthy young farmers, but big places like Liverpool had trainee businessmen who would one day run financial empires.

Amidst the huge amount of laughter generated by these chosen few, many a great business plan was hatched in the Kardomah. Robert was more inclined than the others to think very carefully before he spoke, because he was the one person at that table who had the financial clout actually to launch a new idea. He knew that a well-thought-out business proposition to his father would be backed, because Vernon Sangster had a firm belief in the inherent entrepreneurial talents of his only son and heir. Now that he had given up his youthful ambition to change his name by deed poll to Rocky Sangster and win the Heavyweight Championship of the World, Robert was eager to make his mark and knew that he deserved to be taken seriously and, if necessary, supported. This was just as it had been between Vernon and his own father Edmund Sangster in the years immediately following the Great War.

Robert fitted into the business world of Liverpool surprisingly well. To meet him it was impossible to avoid the impression of a well-tailored young bon vivant, with several girl friends and eight powerful cylinders to maintain. But he worked hard and was watchful of the firm’s money, ever mindful of how to make more. He also cherished an unspoken, even to himself, ambition to start something of his own within the Vernons Organization just as his father had done so many times.

By the spring of 1960 Robert, now coming up to twenty-four, was planning to get married. He had met and spent almost a year with the very beautiful, tall, dark-haired, Manchester model Christine Street, whose career was on a major upswing with several television appearances to her credit and increasing work in London. Her parents owned the George Hotel in Penrith, a market town in Cumbria, fifteen miles south of the border town of Carlisle. Unsurprisingly Christine was not your average model. She was extremely well educated, having attended one of the best girls’ boarding schools in the north of England – Queen Ethelburga’s at Harrogate – and completed her studies at the Swiss finishing school Brillantmont in Lausanne. She was also extremely well mannered.

A grand society wedding was being planned at Penrith for the month of May, and the lunch club at the Kardomah was heavy with advice for the prospective bridegroom, particularly about the importance of the lunch club, even to a married man. It was into this slightly restless atmosphere that a stranger, named Nick Robinson, walked one morning in early March. He was new to the city and had been brought to the Kardomah by one of the regulars who worked in the giant packaging business built up by Nick’s grandfather, the eighty-year-old Sir Foster Robinson.

Nick’s background was not dissimilar to Robert’s. He had been head boy at his famous prep school, Hawtreys, on the edge of the Savernake Forest in Wiltshire, and had completed his education at Harrow. He had entered the family business at their headquarters in Bristol, but upon his grandfather’s specific instructions had been sent to their Liverpool office for two years to learn the technique of the Sales Department. But where Robert was addicted to hard contact sports like boxing and rugby football, Nick’s game was horse racing. He had been brought up to it, as Robert had been to championship golf.

As they all sat in the Kardomah, the talk turned gradually to the sport which was so important to the newcomer. He told them of his grandfather’s sprawling Wicken Park Stud, in Buckinghamshire, where racing fillies became broodmares and spent almost all of the rest of their lives in foal. He told them of the great breeding stallions of the day, horses who thought nothing of covering forty mares in a season, like Palestine, Court Martial, Swaps, Nashua, Court Harwell, Alycidon and the new young Crepello who had beaten Ballymoss in the 1958 Derby. At that Robert remembered with a blinding flash: ‘That’s my man O’Brien.’ He seriously considered issuing the old ‘Greatest trainer of all time’ line across the young Mr Robinson, but decided against it. Instead he observed, more typically, that upon reflection he’d rather be a stallion than a broodmare.

For a table of young men so profoundly ignorant about the subject of racing thoroughbreds, Nick Robinson was getting a substantial amount of attention. They actually found it rather a fascination. But he really got them when he disclosed the deathless piece of information that the stable which trained for his grandfather thought he might win the Lincolnshire Handicap with his five-year-old bay gelding Chalk Stream. ‘And’, added Nick darkly, ‘it might just be possible to have a really nice touch, at about 20–1.’

Now he was really talking. This group understood money, perhaps above all else, and the chance of landing a sizeable chunk of it without working was, as they say in New York, hitting ’em right where they lived. Robert, already interested, was teetering on the verge of enthralment. ‘OK, Nick,’ he said. ‘Let me just get this straight. The Lincolnshire Handicap is a race, over what distance? One mile? Right. Now, how many are in it? About thirty? Christ, that’s rather a lot, isn’t it? Right. Now why do you think Chalk Stream might win?’

‘Well, for a start, he is a pretty good racehorse. He has some experience, plenty of speed without being a champion or anything, he’s been working extremely well for the past week or so, and above all he runs off a very light weight – under seven stone. We think he has a decent chance.’

‘What do you mean a light weight?’ said someone. ‘I thought they all carried the same weight, otherwise it wouldn’t be fair, would it?’

‘Now this is a tricky subject.’ said Nick doing his best to simplify it. ‘In big races they do all carry the same weight, but this is a handicap and all the horses are weighted differently. The Jockey Club handicapper is basically trying to get them all to finish in a line, a dead heat. So he piles weight on the good horses to slow them up and leaves the less good ones with just a little. The idea being that every horse has a fair chance.’